The Butterfly Effect Read online

  “Iowa in winter?” he offered.

  “Fucking Iowa in winter.”

  Max took the familiar sloping off-ramp to Ames, and the line of hotels on the highway welcomed her back. The radio was on, but she wasn’t listening, not really. The mental wall she had built between the possibilities and life as it had been yesterday was crumbling the nearer they got to the hospital. They didn’t say anything else until the car arrived in front of Mary Greeley. “Text me if you need anything,” Max said. His shirt said “No,” but his eyes said something else. His worried look made her feel even worse.

  She tried to pay him for the ride. After some awkward fumbling, with “no” and “please,” he accepted the rumpled twenty-dollar bill from her wallet.

  The hospital glowered at her from its four-story height. Maybe it was judging her mud-caked boots or her smell. Between the airport dirt and the sweat from yesterday’s research, Greta wished she could have showered before she saw her brother—too late for that. An hour after being picked up from the airport, she climbed into an elevator. Ten hours after jumping onto her first airplane, she checked in at hospital reception.

  * * *

  Greta hadn’t seen Danny in over a year, let alone his girlfriend—fiancée now. She saw their relationship status change on the digital landscape of their lives: “Hey guys, big news from us!” A few weeks later she received a save-the-date postcard for October, as if the whole month was theirs. On the back, they clarified that only one Friday would be required— October 5. In the picture, Danny’s head tilted toward Meg’s like a magnet, but that wasn’t the pull Greta had felt. Repulsion, in this case, wasn’t because she and Meg were too similar. Greta had been surprised to get an invitation at all. The last time she and Danny had talked, she’d been drunk—and honest. Greta said it then, all out in the open, when he told her—he was also drunk—about the ring in his pocket saved for the right time. She’d asked how he could make vows with someone who entered the relationship as a cheater.

  Greta should have called Danny sometime in the last year. She should have gone over for Christmas. She knew what she should have done, like getting the answers corrected on an exam. That didn’t make dealing with the aftereffects of her pride any easier.

  The hospital was a sterile fantasy world of white coats and white walls and white-sneakered nurses. People walked with hurried steps past the white door to the probably white rooms.

  Meg stood near the oval nursing station. She was unrecognizable from the posed and prettified version of herself on the save-the-date card or her filtered social media posts. She wore no makeup to cover the line of large freckles over the bridge of her nose. Meg’s arms folded across her pink sweatshirt, and her blonde hair was wrapped on top of her head in a messy, damp knot. When she noticed Greta, Meg took a step forward, arms uncrossing and raising like an offer. Greta crossed her own arms in response. She didn’t need a hug, especially not from Meg.

  Meg’s eyebrows creased as she stepped back again. “I just got here too. I was here during the surgery but had to run home to shower and send some e-mails and—”

  “Why can’t we see him?”

  Maybe the doctor is in with him,” Meg said. She gestured. “They’ve been so helpful. I know they’ll let us know what to do.”

  The nurse in front of them cradled a phone to his ear and held up a finger.

  “Excuse me,” Greta said, tapping on the counter.

  The nurse’s eyebrows knit together as he more emphatically waved the finger. He finally hung up, then spent a few seconds adjusting his paperwork before acknowledging them. “Yes?”

  “Danny Oto.”

  The nurse pointed to a line of chairs against the nearest white wall. “If you’ll just wait—”

  Greta’s jaw set as though in concrete. “Daniel Oto. Where is he?”

  “You need to sit until they’re ready for you,” the nurse said calmly.

  Meg moved toward the chairs, but Greta planted herself, elbows on the counter and gaze level. The nurse purposefully didn’t look at her. He was close enough that she could smell the hand sanitizer on his desk. After a minute, a door down the hall opened, and a middle-aged female nurse peeked out. “Here to see Daniel?” she asked. After they nodded, she waved them inside.

  “Cleaning him up a bit,” she said cheerfully. “The doctor completed his hourly eval, and things seem stable.”

  The word “seem” hit Greta hard. “Seem” was slippery, poetic, metaphorical, and shifting. She liked certainty. The scientific method required testing a hypothesis with multiple trials, multiple scenarios to find consistency or, more often, not. But they were right. Danny didn’t seem like Danny. He didn’t look like he was sleeping, not at all. His unconsciousness masked his face, whitewashed it. The hospital had shaved his head as smooth as linoleum. Danny’s features were misplaced without his hair—a map with the city names erased. His broken pieces were inside, but the wrongness reflected out from every part of him. Cords and tubes connected him to machines, machines that got closer to him than she could. In the movies, the machines beeped or printed out long slips of paper, but these flashed tiny lights like semaphore she didn’t understand.

  “You can get closer to him, if you’d like,” the nurse said.

  But Greta didn’t want to. Now that she was here, she had lost her bravery. Meg must not have wanted to get closer either, because she stayed near the door, leaning on the jamb in a too-casual, print-model way.

  Their father’s dog tag lay on the metal table next to Danny’s bed. Greta had found it in a box of belongings and given it to Danny on the day of the funeral. He usually wore it, and Greta wished he wore it now, like a magic amulet. As a child she remembered playing with the tag while they read bedtime stories. Leaning into that cove between their father’s arms and chest, where the dog tag hung, had always made Greta feel safe. She tried to press hard enough to imprint the raised letters onto her skin to save for later. Now, she fingered the dog tag gently, then touched Danny’s cheek. She willed some of their dad’s strength to rub off on him.

  After ten minutes, the doctor entered and shared some numbers that didn’t mean anything to Greta. “The fact that he survived it is a good sign,” the doctor concluded. It took most of Greta’s self-control not to say, “Duh.”

  “Things will be touch-and-go for a while,” the doctor said.

  Touch what and go where? Abstractions didn’t comfort.

  The doctor pulled out a grayscale image of a brain. “Here’s the MRI, and this part”—he gestured to a white portion, a blob half-hollow and half-defined— “this is the aneurysm. We stabilized and cauterized the area.”

  “And he’ll be okay?” Meg asked. She was as pale as Danny.

  “He should recover.” The doctor closed the folder after tucking the MRI printout back inside. “There are no guaranteed outcomes, but the first responders got him to the hospital quickly, well within the golden hour. He might wake soon. In the meantime, check with the nurse on duty, Craig. We need some paperwork filled out to continue treatment.”

  Craig, of the glare and hand sanitizer, had the forms ready for them.

  “Divide and conquer,” Meg said, halving the stack and handing it to her. Some paperwork translated to half a tree. Hadn’t Greta just been in an actual rain forest less than a day ago? She pictured the carcass of a mossy tree on her lap, her eyes moving over the words on the top page without really reading.

  The stack of hospital forms didn’t answer any questions—would Danny die? What would happen now? It only posed a hundred that Greta didn’t know the answer to. Next of kin? She assumed herself, the only literal kin that Danny had. Insurance? Somehow, the thrilling world of health insurance hadn’t come up in their dinners. Greta glanced over at Meg, whose pen danced across the pages. She wondered if Meg knew the name of Danny’s primary care physician. Greta sure as hell didn’t. She was positive that Meg didn’t know the name of his pediatrician. They had both gone to Dr. DeVries, who gave out lollip
ops in exchange for shots and usually sucked on one himself during examinations. Dr. DeVries had died ten years ago. For all Greta knew, Danny hadn’t been to a doctor in years. She hadn’t. It wasn’t that odd for a healthy twenty-something-year-old.

  But if he hadn’t been healthy.

  If a check-up could have caught something.

  Greta’s head swam, and she stood. The hospital forms splashed onto the carpet, flying off in every direction. Meg peered up from her paperwork. “You okay?” Her gentle tone threw Greta off balance.

  “Yeah,” Greta said. She took a deep breath, then knelt to collect the papers. After a minute, she had it together again— the paperwork, if not her thoughts.

  Danny didn’t wake before they left.

  * * *

  Meg dropped Greta off at the campus hotel, not exiting the car to help hoist her roller bags or backpack. Meg’s car kicked up snow onto Greta’s pants as it pulled away. Greta murmured a curse under her fogging breath.

  In her room, she showered and changed into a fresh set of clothes from her bags. She wanted to wear her fluffy slippers down to the food court, but knew she’d have to walk through the wet slush from everyone else’s boots. Instead, she slid on a clean pair of Nikes.

  The Memorial Union hummed with dinner activity. Greta stood in the long line for brand-name Chinese and ordered too much. She brought it up the three flights of stairs into her hotel room for fear of being seen by a student or, worse, someone from her lab.

  The food had cooled down by the time she got to her room, but still tasted salty and sweet. She ate every bite of it, dipping the egg rolls in the leftover General Tso’s sauce. The cashier had tucked two fortune cookies in the bag, assuming charitably that Greta planned to share or that Greta needed more luck than usual. Greta ate both cookies too. When she finished, she lay back on the bed and eyed the clock. This time yesterday she had been on a night walk in the rain forest. The cloud forest: magical and distant and everything that wasn’t central Iowa in January. She came back to find Meg’s call waiting for her.

  The hotel room smelled of a too-hot furnace, burning dust. As she settled under the thin comforter, she reimagined her small room back in Costa Rica. She could be back there in a matter of days once this was sorted out. The constant sweater of humid rain forest air was preferable to Iowa’s winter chill. Even the word “Iowa” tugged her away from the mental picture of paradise. Ames, her city, sounded like an arrow shot left of its target. As she closed her eyes, the reality of this room’s noises fell on her. No orchestra of insects and no birds conversing, only the sound of the furnace and the faraway voices of students accosted her. And now, now Danny was sick. Dying? Already dead since she saw him three hours ago?

  Call Martha or not? That question hovered over everything else.

  Meg wouldn’t know to; Meg probably thought their mother was dead. Meg had been in the picture for only the last three years of their fifteen-year estrangement. Meg couldn’t understand the missing part of an equation she’d never fully seen. Meg couldn’t miss someone she never met, couldn’t mourn the memory of Martha before. But also, Greta knew, Meg might understand Martha’s leaving—the language of unfaithfulness—and that would be unbearable.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Three days after the aneurysm, Danny regained consciousness. The nurse called, and Greta had to interrupt her strenuous schedule of sitting on the hotel bed staring at the wall and pretending she wasn’t there.

  Everything in her had wanted to return to Costa Rica now, but she’d made the wrong choice with Dad’s heart attack five years ago. Danny, the good twin, left college in Ohio. Danny came home. Danny held Dad’s hand. Danny missed his final exams, and Danny slept by his father’s bedside. Danny found Dad dead the next morning. Greta? Greta was in the lab, only ten miles from the hospital, and assumed they had more time. She was sure she couldn’t live now with another ghost at her shoulder, one with her birthday and who had half her childhood wrapped up in his brain. She couldn’t lose Danny.

  But thinking of Danny made her cringe. The problem was that she now had too much time to think of Danny. No job, no energy to call Max, and no desire to study, for once. Besides the physical baggage she had brought back from Costa Rica, which lay scattered around her hotel room, she pictured the emotional baggage flung there too. Fifteen years of it since their mother Martha left. Five years since their father died. Three years since Meg did whatever Meg did to Danny.

  Relationships—what a joke.

  A week, Greta had promised Larry Almond, her advisor. Then she could pack her real baggage and get back on the plane to resume her research. He had been all confidence and concern since Danny’s hospitalization. Larry had even offered her some airline miles for her return trip.

  But now, Danny was regaining consciousness, and Greta was here to see it. Crisis averted. The research could wait a week. It wasn’t like the butterflies would miss her.

  As she leaned against the back of the hospital elevator, Greta saw Meg enter the lobby. She made eye contact with Greta as she ran toward the door, its jaws already half closed. Meg tripped in her kitten heels but made it into the elevator in time to trigger the sensor. The door paused, then flew back again. Meg glared at Greta and punched the already-lit button for Danny’s floor. “You could have hit the ‘Open’ button,” she muttered.

  “I could have.” Greta refrained from mentioning that she hadn’t hit the ‘Close’ button either.

  Their rush had been in vain. By the time they got to Danny’s hospital room, he was sleeping again.

  “It takes a lot of effort to heal,” the nurse said. Her reassuring tone failed to reassure. “But while you’re both here, you should think about checking in with the social worker.”

  The last social worker Greta had met came after Martha left. That one had a clipboard and a clear sense of self-righteousness that stank as much as her raspberry body spray. “Your mother ran away?” the stranger had asked, sitting in their father’s usual spot. He had been in bed since Martha left. “How does that make you feel?”

  Danny had brought the social worker a plate of Oreos—a fourteen-year-old host at his finest. When the social worker left, she dropped a carbon copy of her report on the coffee table. “Continued assessment recommended.”

  Greta had crossed her arms then, and she did so now. “No thanks.”

  “Really, Nadine is great. She’ll help get you set up with services.” The nurse said the word “services” with relish, a prize car on a game show.

  Meg checked the time on her phone. “I’ve still got half an hour of lunch,” she said.

  “Have fun,” Greta said, walking toward the elevator.

  “No,” Meg said. “Come on. This is for Danny. We need to be a team.”

  Teaming up with Meg on anything was laughable. Perky Meg, whose voice sometimes had that rising, questioning inflection even when she wasn’t asking something. Meg, who coached cheerleading. Meg, who used words like “squee” in her social media posts. And anyway, Greta did not do teams. She had faked her period to sit out of dodgeball in seventh grade and had asked to opt out of group projects in college. She worked alone or took the F, in the case of gym class. But she couldn’t take an F for Danny, not when he was all she had left. “Fine.”

  Ten minutes later and two floors down, a woman with thin, dark glasses and a gray ponytail ushered Greta and Meg into a small room; it was little more than a closet with a desk inside. She offered her hand for both to shake. Meg took it, clutching like the woman was a handrail and she was falling. Greta did not shake hands; she was not a dog or a politician.

  The social worker gestured at two chairs that sat so closely they were nearly stacked. After sitting, Greta scooted hers as far away as she could without ramming into the door.

  “I’m Daniel’s case worker, Nadine,” the social worker said after they sat down. “The doctors already talked to you?”

  Meg nodded. Greta crossed her arms.

  “Well, I just lik
e to talk to the family right away to ensure that we get records straight and that everyone understands patient rights.”

  Nadine pulled open a desk drawer. She flipped through paperwork, and a moment later she handed Meg another stack of pages and a few brochures from the plastic caddies mounted on the wall around her. The social worker lectured for the next ten minutes like they were about to be tested. Meg scribbled notes on a piece of paper while Greta stared at the woman’s desk. Even with so little space in the room, she’d filled every inch of desk with football tchotchkes in the Iowa State college colors of cardinal and gold. Little quarterbacks, goal posts. Nadine droned on about insurance—what it covered and what it did not. Rehabilitation programs for brain injury. The Family Medical Leave Act.

  Meg interrupted her spiel. “I can get leave from my job to take care of him?”

  “There are some restrictions, of course. How long you’ve worked at your job, etcetera, but yes.”

  Greta’s brain might as well have been a Jell-O mold at a picnic, the kind with little pieces of banana suspended in it. She had spent the past few days moping around the hotel that she couldn’t afford, keeping out of the public eye and planning her return trip to Costa Rica. “How long will it take?” It was the first time Greta had spoken.

  Nadine turned toward her. “Well, the time line is different for everyone. Once he’s released in a week or two, he’ll need some rehabilitation. We won’t know the full scope until his neurologist, Dr. Traeger, can assess him. It will be a busy few months, though.”

  Greta should have figured brain injury wouldn’t be like a windshield chip, repaired over a lunch break, but the time line of months caught her off guard. “I’m supposed to be out of the country. I’m supposed to be doing research for my dissertation.”

  Nadine leaned forward, her elbows denting the papers on her desk. She reached a hand across the desk, attempting to touch Greta.